Amazon Kindle Fire HD Tablets Now Up For Pre-Order in 170 Countries

Amazon still isn't saying anything about the rumored smartphone everyone is talking about, but they are definitely making their Android ambitions clear.

Early this morning the retail giant announced that the Kindle Fire HD tablets were now available for pre-order from 170 countries, with the first models shipping out on 13 June. The tablets are priced at the local equivalents of $284 for the 8.9" Kindle Fire HD and $214 for the 7 inch Kindle Fire HD.

That bit of news followed shortly after yesterday's news that the Amazon Appstore was open for business in 195 countries around the world. That event actually happened early in the day, and it coincided with the release of a new update for the Appstore client app.

Amazon announced the expansion just over a month ago, but up until yesterday the Amazon Appstore had only been live in a handful of countries: the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, and Japan. The Appstore works with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets as well as other Android devices, and it makes perfect sense that Amazon opened it up at the same time as they are ramping up their Kindle Fire tablet distribution.

“We are thrilled to be expanding the reach of our global app distribution to nearly 200 countries. We think our customers will love the app selection we have to offer and also find features such as Free App of the Day and personalized recommendations very helpful as they discover and explore new apps and games,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon."

To celebrate the expansion, Amazon will offer up Fruit Ninja for their Free App of the Day on Thursday, followed by Cut the Rope: Experiments on Friday. If you would like a dailt reminder about the free apps, you can subscribe to Appazonia. This is a service I offer that sends out daily reminder posts for each of the free apps.

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

Amazon is pretty smart, so perhaps they’ll come out with more and more freebies to sell their tablets/ecosystem in countries where they don’t yet have on-the-ground fulfillment for physical goods (which, by offering free delivery, has made Amazon Prime successful here). Free app of the day is one small step, perhaps there will be others.

In the meantime, they need to keep increasing their app selection to close whatever gap exists with regular Android tablets. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, in that they need to stay big & relevant to get developers to tailor their apps for their version of Android. So, this rollout seems to make sense from that perspective, but they must offer sufficient freebies to get the ball rolling on sales.

The price points mentioned seem quite high, especially for emerging markets where people have smaller budgets. But, perhaps these are just pre-order prices to pick off the bigger spenders who see prestige in getting the Kindle Fire before anyone else (but who don’t have the budget to buy an iPad).

Does seem like they have their work cut out for them with cheaper and cheaper Android tablets hitting the market… On the other hand, perhaps they will hire (or already have hired) the Chinese vendors producing those tablets to make the next generation of Kindle Fire. Does seem like it makes strategic sense for them to have their own device out there to maintain dominance in ebooks, etc.

Both Amazon and Barnes and Nobles have slashed their prices on their tablets within just a few months of their release. So I’m assuming that will happen again. In fact I believe it is an industry trend among tablets not long after they are released. Google also slashed their price on their tablet, not long after it was released.